Dethroning the King (15 page)

After his tire was finally blown out, police found a loaded .38 caliber revolver on the floor behind The Fourth's driver's seat and took him into custody, charging him with two counts of third-degree assault, unlawful use of a weapon, and various traffic violations. The assault charges stemmed from the allegation that he nearly hit both officers who tried to approach his vehicle. Once they realized who they had arrested, however, the cops bent down and changed The Fourth's tire, chatting while they worked about how much they loved Grant's Farm. The Fourth said he hadn't ridden the train that circled the compound since he was 12 years old, which shocked one of the officers.

“You get me out of this,” The Fourth said according to
Under the Influence
, a book on the Busch family, “and I'll fucking give you that train.”

The Fourth's spokesman said the next day that he hadn't pulled over during the chase because the undercover officers were impersonating criminal types—he thought they were kidnappers. The police said they had taken chase because they thought The Fourth was a drug dealer who drove a similar car. After a three-day trial, 21-year-old August IV was acquitted, and his father stood up to personally shake the jurors' hands.

The indignities brought on by those public referenda on August IV's character and silver-spoon upbringing were overwhelming. Every citizen in St. Louis could already deftly weave a story about the scandal-plagued Busch family when called upon, and The Fourth's delinquencies made matters worse. They also made it harder for him to turn on a dime and devote himself to the company in the same way his father had. By 1997, The Third was telling the media that his son's past wasn't an issue anymore. Yet even during the takeover battle with InBev, 25 years after the Arizona crash, the
New York Times
decided to dredge up and rehash all of the sordid details yet again. “I wouldn't care too much about it,” The Fourth told one of his advisors the day of the
Times
report, shrugging it off after so many years of badgering. “They'll be wrapping fish with it tomorrow.”

While the heavily public scandals sullied The Fourth's reputation to a point where many would-be CEOs wouldn't have been able to recover, they failed to damage his standing enough to put his single greatest ambition out of reach, and he threw himself into the family business a few years after returning to St. Louis. The Fourth's professional “reformation” wasn't nearly as stark or all-encompassing as his father's—he never progressed to a point where anyone would consider him austere.

“He always had, and still has, personal demons,” said Harry Schuhmacher. But he certainly made an effort to recover from the past and prove the naysayers wrong.

In many respects, the grassroots start of his career at Anheuser-Busch mirrored his father's. In one particularly critical way, though, The Fourth's approach differed starkly. Rather than having the foresight to build a team of loyalists and pull them up through the ranks as The Third had with his eaters, The Fourth let himself be led by The Third. “When I was there, the thinking was ‘When is it going to click for August IV, and when is he going to build that kind of team?'” said one former staffer. “His closest people around him were his partying, socializing people who were not really telling him the truth.” The Fourth took a more casual approach to leadership than his father did, and while it put his subordinates at ease, it also left them wondering whether he had the guts and drive to run a global corporation. Had he not been born with the name August Busch IV, some insiders said he might never have been a candidate for promotion to the top.

The Fourth worked hard, perhaps because he knew his detractors' talking points all too well. In 1991, he acknowledged how complicated it could be to sit in his chair. “Everybody thinks, ‘It must be easy to be you,' ” he said. “It's probably the hardest thing in the world to be me and to work under the pressure you have to be under. You have to do three times as good as the next guy to be considered to be doing the same job as he does.”

August IV spent his first few years of official employment at Anheuser-Busch on the brewing side of the business. He worked for roughly a year as an assistant to legendary brewmaster Gerhardt Kraemer, spent another year as a line foreman, and spent three years as an apprentice brewer, even joining the Local Six branch of the Brewers & Maltsters union in a symbolic hat-tip toward the company's manual laborers. After dropping out of the University of Arizona, he finished a bachelor's degree in finance at St. Louis University in 1987 and then went to Europe to earn a brewmaster's degree from the heralded Berlin academy Versuchs und Lehranstalt für Brauerei.

Once his technical brewing education was deemed sufficient, The Fourth was pulled into an enviable position as an assistant to Mike Roarty. Many of the company's top executives over the years came up through the Marketing Department, and the move positioned August IV as the potential nucleus of the next generation.

Given August III's significant involvement in Anheuser-Busch's marketing efforts, The Fourth's promotion meant he'd be spending more time with his father. This set them on a collision course in a creative discipline in which decisions can be extremely subjective. The Fourth discovered when he began working for Roarty that he had a distinctive talent for marketing—and particularly for understanding the younger generations of beer drinkers whose habits and humor preferences tended to stump The Third. August IV instinctively sensed that the younger market wanted to see ad campaigns that were lively and irreverent, not ones with sappy ads that preached the merits of beechwood aging.

In February of 1990, The Fourth won his first big assignment at the age of 25 when he became senior brand manager for Bud Dry. It was a challenging post. Americans weren't sold on the idea of dry beers, which are brewed to have less aftertaste. But they were more profitable. The Fourth was charged with finding a way to spin Bud Dry into gold.

Under The Fourth's leadership, the company began running spots pegged on the phrase “Why Ask Why? Try Bud Dry,” and the brand sprinted out quickly after its April 1990 launch, selling double the amount of beer Miller Lite sold in its first year in just nine months. Despite its auspicious beginnings, however, the dry beer category failed to gain long-term traction and Bud Dry ultimately sputtered and sank. That didn't derail August IV, however, who had already been named senior manager for the flagship Budweiser brand in the summer of 1991.

Budweiser's branding under his command took on a more casual, approachable flavor and gravitated toward quirkier humor, which proved incredibly successful. His efforts were noted by The Third, who promoted young August IV in 1994 to the high-ranking position of vice president of brand management, which put him in charge of all of the company's beer brands.

During the early years of his tenure as CEO, The Third demanded frequent, in-person updates from his Marketing Department and ad agencies to ensure that they were developing acceptable new ideas. Each week, he would peruse their new storyboards and assign them the green or red light. As The Fourth rose to increasing prominence within the Marketing Department, ad agencies began presenting their ideas directly to him. He would then take certain concepts upstairs and pitch them to his father behind closed doors.

The relay-style method seemed geared toward molding The Fourth into a stronger leadership candidate, but it also made life much easier for advertising staffers, who used August IV as a buffer against his father. The Fourth had plenty of experience handling his cantankerous dad, and he proved adept at blocking and tackling to keep the company's creative types free from too much outside interference.

“He would take the bullets, protecting us from the shots that might come from the 60-year-old men on the ninth floor,” said one former marketing executive. “He could take five or six bullets and not drop dead, and I could only take two. He had a thicker suit of armor than we had on.”

“I think that was all part of the seasoning process,” said another former ad agency executive. “I think his dad wanted to see him in action. The Fourth had gut instincts, and he believed in them. He was not an empty suit or the owner's son. He was a presence and a factor on his own, and he fought for work that his dad wouldn't have approved in a million years.”

The Fourth's greatest marketing coup may have been the Budweiser “Frogs” ad campaign, in which three bullfrogs croaked out the word “Budweiser” one syllable at a time. A team of creative staffers from D'Arcy pitched the idea in storyboard form to August IV and Bob Lachky in 1994. It had none of the traditional Anheuser-Busch visual gimmicks, but it was fresh and attention-grabbing, and it had the potential to turn the word “Budweiser” into a pop culture catchphrase. The Fourth caught on right away and served the concept up to his father.

“He took to the idea and brought it up to his father, but his dad didn't understand it,” said Charlie Claggett. “Nobody was in that meeting. Apparently, they had kind of an argument about it, because it broke all the rules. It didn't have the ‘pour shot,' a lot of things. And August III just didn't get it. He didn't understand why it was funny, why it was relevant to a younger market. But to his credit, he let August IV go with it.”

The ad campaign wasn't just borderline bizarre—it was also expensive. No one knew up front how much it would cost to get three frogs to say “Bud-wei-ser,” but D'Arcy's team sensed that it wouldn't be cheap.

“So we go and start talking to production companies in Hollywood, saying ‘What are we going to do, how are we going to do this? We can't just take three frogs and nail their little webbed feet to a board and get them to say Budweiser,'” Claggett said. “The only way we could do it was to use animatronics, which is not cheap. To our horror, we came back with the price tag of $1.25 million, which was, 20 years ago, a lot of money for a 30-second spot that August III didn't even like very much. But again, this was a company that operated by instinct and feel, and August IV thought this was great. There was a lot of angst and worrying, but they said ‘Okay, do it. ' So we did.” After a strong set of reviews in a few test markets, the ad made its national debut during the Super Bowl in early 1995 and is still listed as one of the best Super Bowl commercials in history.

The Fourth made it clear to his marketing colleagues that he knew their hard work reflected on him. He told several creative executives in the 1980s and 1990s that his ability to ascend to the top of Anheuser-Busch's ladder lay partly in their hands.

“The Fourth is a savvy guy and a sensitive guy,” said a former marketer who worked with him closely. “Because of that, he would never come out and say, ‘Will you help me be chairman of the company? ' But he would say, ‘My future is kind of determined by the work you guys do. I'll stay behind you just as long as you make me look good.' He didn't have to say it, because it was understood. It was kind of his job to lose. It was never like
Falcon Crest
or
Dallas
, coveting the job and thinking, ‘I'll do whatever I can do get it.' ”

Bob Lachky, who was 10 years older than August IV, suffered at points from the coincidence of being an equal to him in all but family name. Lachky was aggressively courted by The Third and eventually hired out of DDB Needham in 1990 to be Anheuser's brand manager for Bud Light, but he spent more time than he wanted in that position after August IV was tapped instead to manage the Budweiser brand family two years later. The two didn't know each other well at the time, but The Fourth took pains to reach out in an attempt to mend fences.

“He came to me and said, ‘Look, I know this was yours, and you deserve this. I'm doing it because of who I am, I recognize that. But let's work together,'” Lachky said. He and The Fourth became friends that day. “Some people at times saw that as a weakness,” Lachky said. “It is truly one of his great traits. He clearly wanted others to stand up and get recognized. I said ‘August, I'll forever be indebted to you for that.' I wasn't naïve. I was smart enough to know he was going to be my boss one day.”

“It's easy to bash him,” Lachky said. “But I don't think there's a step in that company that he didn't earn.”

When The Fourth ultimately became CEO, he ended up with less support than he needed. During his days in marketing, he had both a talent for the work and a network of highly qualified and successful people surrounding him. “They set it up so that he always had training wheels,” said one former ad agency executive. “He was set up so that the people around him would make him ready.”

With that support as a catalyst, The Fourth's tenure in marketing produced a string of hits that marked Anheuser-Busch's best era. He had a knack for identifying out-of-the-box ads that worked. In 1999, four years after the “Frogs” campaign debuted, August IV pushed yet another controversial spot onto the air that evolved into a similarly memorable blockbuster.